Alejandro Jodorowsky: A Spirited Talk With The ‘Santa Sangre’ Director

There’s a party-line response that reporters often get from directors about their work, and in particular, their career, which is that they ‘eat, sleep and breathe film.’ While this certainly may be true for some filmmakers, such proclamations are actually an understatement for Chilean auteur Alejandro Jodorowsky. “I make a picture as an expression, artistic expression of my soul,” Jodorowsky said last week from Europe. “For me it’s alive, like my liver, like my lungs, like myself. My pictures are part of me.”

Remarkably, the 81-year-old is just as sincere as those cinephile filmmakers 50 years his junior, but he’s much more humble about the prospect of discussing his considerable filmography, not to mention the extraordinary life that influenced it. “If somebody is interested in my picture, I have great pleasure to speak about it.”

This week, home video distributor Severin Films released a special-edition DVD and Blu-ray of “Santa Sangre,” the director’s 1989 surrealist masterpiece. Speakeasy caught up with Jodorowsky last week via telephone to discuss the release of that film in particular and his anachronistic approach to filmmaking in general.

The Wall Street Journal: When you go back to do a commentary like you did on “Santa Sangre,” do you ever discover things in them that you didn’t see when you were making them?

Every time I explain the picture, I discover something because every explanation is subjective. You know, it’s how you are on the day, and then every day is not the same; they are different, and then you have a different explanation. But sometimes in my picture there are some scenes or some parts that I did it without understanding what I was doing. By example, in “Santa Sangre,” there’s a person who has a plastic ear, and he takes his ear and puts it in the mouth of a girl who doesn’t speak. It was very strong for me, but still today I cannot explain its real meaning.

How do you initially start when you are creating a film? Do they evolve from a story that you want to tell or a character or an idea?

It’s really, really step by step. I start with an idea and then I write a script in order to convince the producers, because always a producer wants to see the script. And then I write approximately a script as best I can. [But] the script is not reality; when I come with the photographer, with the special effects, and with the actors, that changes. I start to do other things. When I start to shoot, also it’s changing, because I can take a phenomenon or something will happen in the place I am shooting. Like in “Sante Sangre,” there was a drunk woman singing. Immediately, I got excited and so I put her in the picture, because it was like a gift for me in the moment…You don’t have the picture in the beginning; you have the picture only in the end — that is how I work.

Do you find that the symbolism is easily injected into your films?

When I was an adolescent, I abandoned my country at 23 years to come to Paris to know Andre Breton, the ‘Pope of Surrealism.’ And for three years, I was there working with him being a surrealist. For me, surrealism is in my blood; it’s not an effort. I also then start to do work in dreams, working with dreams. I opened the door between the consciousness and the unconsciousness, the world of dreams. For me they are no different, reality and dreams. It’s not difficult for me.

Why do you think so few filmmakers today seem to use the kinds of symbolism that you have used in your films?

It is very important for me that when you make a work of art or work, you use experience. New filmmakers have not experienced that in real life, they have only experienced the movies; they know movies, they make movies, and they speak about movies all of the time, and they’re living in that world…So when I shoot something, it’s not coming from my cinematographic experience, but from my direct life experience. It’s different.

Are you eager or reluctant to talk about the personal experiences that gave you ideas for your films?

No, I am not eager. It’s like this, there are very real things and not really true things, no life, but all that is a style, is a world, is a universe. And I was creating some kind of universe with movies, comics and novels, therapies -– I created some kind of galaxy or universe with real things and with life, history, things like that. It’s another way to make characters -– life transformed into novels. It’s real, but it’s a novel.

Do you ever feel like the discussion of these ideas risks of reducing your films to a single interpretation, or does it enhance the emotional and artistic power of your films?

I don’t like [to call my films] a comic picture or a horror picture or a drama or suspense film. I think life has everything in it at the same time. Some person will see an accident and they like to see that, and another person see the same accident and they are terrified, or another will laugh. In front of an accident, any person will react in according with his subjectivity. That I wanted to do with my pictures — you see my picture and can laugh or you can get angry or you can get horrified or you can be sad. I am not like Hitchcock, directing the reaction of the public or the audience. I don’t like that. I think this is some kind of fascism -– “You need to react like that.” No. No. It’s not like this; everyone needs to react as he can.

Do you ever feel like you come to terms with any of the events in your personal life when you explore them in your films?

Yes, yes. The picture is showing me — when I am making the picture I am having an experience, because for me it is a matter of life and death. Do you know I made a picture under very difficult conditions, and I risked sometimes my life, really. On “The Holy Mountain,” I had a revolutionary in front of me saying “it’s time to shoot,” or something like that, “or I will kill you!” And that changed me, because it showed me how to have the courage to do something against everything –- to commit and do it. And then I changed -– I was not the same.

In many cases, a lot of time passes between each film you do. Would you like to work more frequently?

I don’t need to make one movie after the other, because when I finish the picture, I am completely empty. I say everything I wanted to say there, and then need to live [in order to] have another interest –- There are other ways of living than to go to a picture. I am not enthusiastic to make a new picture when I finish one picture. I have projects, but when I cannot make them, I cannot do in pictures I make them in comics. I have a lot of comics I did that were pictures I could not do in movies. Because for me, comics is an art, not like in America where the comics are only [about] superheroes. I most like the underground comics who try to speak about other things, and I do that in comics.

In America, the cinematographic industry is going now in a way that’s not art; it’s a big industry with a lot of techniques for performance and three dimensional [technology] –- that’s where the movies are going. Movies are going to a funny thing, a joke thing, to a superficial thing, and they do not have a deep meaning inside because everything is made for people who are children. There is no big aspiration to art or something like that. It’s an industry where the only principle is to make a product for a child audience. In order to make a picture now, we need to think of a different way to do it – maybe not to make a picture for theaters, but maybe make a picture for Internet. Not to make picture to make fortunes, but maybe make a picture to have a great audience, a great social communication — to work for the awakening of the culture, the artistical culture, the philosophical culture, to work for that to really make growth in these children.

Your next project, I think, is the “Sons of El Topo” – is that correct?

Well, I have two projects. First, I had “The Sons of El Topo,” and I was very, very happy because I found Russian producers. I don’t want to say their names, but they [said] they would make “El Topo,” we worked three months, and it was fantastic. I made the script, but soon they disappeared. The Russians disappeared after three months, and I didn’t have an explanation, I don’t know why they disappeared — no explanation, I don’t know what happened. Mystery. And then they tried to say to me, well, I need to make a picture producing it myself; that way, you will have the security to do whatever you want, no? And after that, I started to produce it myself.

So what are you working on now?

I am writing a book. I am trying to do “Sons of El Topo,” so maybe they will appear –- the Russians will come. But if that person is not happy in four months, in May, I will go to Chile and start to shoot my biography because I made a book named “The Dance of Reality,” which [is about] when I was a child in a little town in the north of Chile. It was a very magical moment, and we will start to do that; I have spoken already with the town, and all of the town is ready to work with me. So maybe that is my next project.

Do you feel like your films have found an appreciation from audiences, or is it enough just for you to make those films and to have that passion?

This is a gift that God give to me — it’s a gift. Because when I made this picture I was not searching for a kind of audience. I did whatever I wanted, whatever I liked. Generally to make a picture, you make a study of what kind of audience or what kind of market you are trying to touch — this is a market for children, this is a market for a romantic women, this is a market for a person who likes fights, a market. My pictures are still alive, and that is a gift, because all of the time persons speak to me about the mythology or are speaking about my pictures you see on the internet all of the time, and they are alive still. It’s very difficult in this industry for a picture to last six months — in six months, they take the money and they are finished. But my pictures have a very young audience, and this is very good for me – I like that. And that is because of [rock stars] that like my pictures, like Marilyn Manson and all of these rock music groups for young people who love my picture. That created a young audience, a lot, and I think it is a gift. I didn’t work for that.